Welcome to this weeks PROCSSS newsletter! In this entry I'll be writing about leveraging social media while being a creative that doesn't fit neatly into one category. I'll also be sharing a new collage illustration and a new digital zine, On that note, let't get to it!

I'm old enough to have a clear view of the positive and negative ways that social media has impacted being an artist in the past few decades. We lived through an era where, for a time, your work had the potential for unprecedented reach on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

I owe much of my professional career to the exposure I was able to generate in this era, but found that there was a price that came along with it for artists that worked in more than one medium.

You had to choose.

I realized early on in my career that people hiring creatives on social media looked for specialists. Due to the way that images are consumed on these platforms (on a phone, asynchronously, and somewhat ephemerally), in many cases you only had one opportunity to catch someone's eye. Nuance was punished algorithmically in exchange for clarity, so artists placed their work into easily quantified boxes for the potential of greater exposure. It was a replacement for your portfolio so of course you would tailor it to the type of work you were seeking. Which is fine but...what if you don't fit into their box? And how did this affect how YOU viewed your own work?

For me, this dynamic resulted in a bifurcated online presence: one focused on photography and another that was focused on my art/design practice. I had two of everything: websites, social media profiles, and client lists. It was successful to a certain extent but it presented an incomplete picture as whole and there was zero cross-pollination between the two accounts. It took years to unlearn this way of thinking about my own creativity and consolidate my online presence. The lesson here is that although it is difficult to build a creative practice in the algorithmic age, stay true to your vision.

Don't minimize your work to fit into the boxes that exist (Anti-Box Theory).